BIOS

RIM hangs onto smartphone lead in Canada

Research In Motion unveils new operating system called BBX for BlackBerry devices

Text:

The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, November 30, 2011 7:37PM EST

TORONTO - Google's share of the Canadian smartphone market doubled between June to September while Research in Motion and Apple slipped, according to a report by measurement firm comScore.

About eight million Canadians owned a smartphone in September and 35.8 per cent were using a BlackBerry, said comScore on Wednesday.

Apple had 30.1 per cent of the market, Google's Android platform had 25 per cent, Symbian had 4.2 per cent and Microsoft had 3.2 per cent.

RIM dropped about six percentage points since comScore's previous mobile report in June, Apple lost almost one per cent and Android experienced a major growth spurt from 12 per cent.

"Canada is still a BlackBerry nation, BlackBerry still has the largest share of smartphones in Canada, but we see Android ... really growing significantly," said comScore vice-president Bryan Segal.

"That's growing at a really quick rate."

In all, 20.1 million Canadians aged 13 or older had a cellphone in September, with 40 per cent owning a smartphone. In June, smartphones represented 33 per cent of all mobile phones in Canada, and Segal noted smartphone adoption is growing fast.

"Seven per cent raw growth is extremely big, you're talking about a very large percentage of people moving to smartphones, which bodes well for mobile media, advertising and talks to a trend that's happening in the marketplace around the world."

While Android is gaining ground on RIM and Apple quickly, Segal notes that all three players are still selling more and more phones.

"When you talk about market shares it always gets disguised as 'this company is taking this share' but across the board there's been so much growth on the smartphone side and all of these three major players are showing significant growth."

In the U.S., Android had 44.8 per cent of the smartphone market in September, Apple had 27.4 per cent and RIM had 18.9 per cent. Android grew 4.6 per cent since June, Apple was up almost one per cent and RIM was down 4.6 per cent.